Many mobile, embedded or cloud based applications require, at the least, a user name password to be accessed on one or more devices. Users may have more than one account per application. For a legitimate user to access such applications he or she, by way of example, typically either adopts the same user name and password for all applications and accounts or stores the various user names and associated passwords chosen for each case on a list. More often than not, for simplicity of entering this information, most legitimate users do not choose either strong user names or, more importantly, strong passwords or other identifying information. Both of these approaches are prone to illegitimate parties, who are not authorized, to access sites and information as well as potentially manipulating data belonging to legitimate users.
To protect against such intrusion and manipulation whilst assuring that only legitimate user(s) that are properly authenticated have access their applications requires securing any secret information required to access these applications as well as minimizing exposure to any exposed sensitive information. Moreover, any secrets that protect information must themselves be strong and access needs to be as simple and automated as possible in the course of safeguarding and assuring confidentiality.
US 20130145447 A1 entitled “Cloud-based data backup and sync with secure local storage of access keys” discloses methods and systems provided for secure online data access. In one embodiment, three levels of security are provided where user master passwords are not required at a server. A user device may register with a storage service and receive a user device key that is stored on the device and at the service. The user device key may be used to authenticate the user device with the storage service. As data in the storage service is encrypted with a master password, the data may be protected from disclosure. As a user master key or derivative thereof is not used in authentication, the data may be protected from a disclosure or breach of the authentication credentials. Encryption and decryption may thus be performed on the user device with a user master key that may not be disclosed externally from the user device.
US 20120253985 A1 entitled “Method and system for extraction and accumulation of shopping data” discloses a method for shopping cart validation automation, comprising analyzing a webpage to determine if it contains a shopping cart structure and if the user has expressed desire to initiate a checkout procedure, extracting shopping cart and other price elements from pages of a checkout tunnel, accumulating such information for the shopping transaction, validating the shopping transaction using the accumulated information, and allowing the user to confirm or cancel the transaction upon validation. Alternatively, the method may message the use that the transaction is not reconcilable where the shopping cart could not be validated. Also, the system can advantageously build a history database storing transactional details, including screen shots of pages of the checkout tunnel.
US 20120116921 A1 entitled “Method and computer system for purchase on the web” discloses a method for online purchase automation, comprising identifying when the user has selected to navigate to or receive a web page related to a purchasing action, identifying when content of the web page is received; analyzing the web page concurrent with the purchase action, without requiring detailed structural information about the web page in advance, and determining whether the web page is related to a purchasing action, by parsing the web page or related data elements. If the web page is related to a purchasing action, the next steps are determining the user interface elements of the web page or related data elements, retrieving site-independent customer data for the purchase based on the analyzing of the user interface elements, simulating user input using the site-independent customer data to populate at least portions of the web page, and displaying to the user the populated purchasing page for user action.
US 20120117569 A1 entitled “Task automation for unformatted tasks determined by user interface presentation formats” discloses methods and systems provided for web page task automation. In one embodiment, the method comprises of the following steps: i) decomposing the high level task into a sequence of anthropomimetic subroutines, ii) decomposing each routine into a series of anthropomimetic actions or steps, for example stored as a unit shares of work, iii) generating computer code to interact with the content of the webpage, for each unit share of work, iv) executing the generated computer code by a web interface module, and transmitting the results of the execution of computer code, steps iii) and iv) being repeated until all steps of a subroutine have been executed, until the sequence of subroutines for a logical task have been achieved.
US 20120117455 A1 entitled “Anthropomimetic analysis engine for analyzing online forms to determine user view-based web page semantics” discloses an analysis engine that executes under client control to review web pages in real-time and control interaction with the web pages of a website to assist the user of the client in providing selections, providing information and otherwise interacting with the website. In analyzing web pages, the engine uses rule-based logic and considers web pages from an anthropomimetic view, i.e., considers the content, forms and interaction elements as would be perceived and dealt with by a human user, as opposed to by merely considering the web pages in their native form, such as HTML formatted files.
Therefore, there is need for a safe future-proof method for ever evolving multi-application and multi-account access on multiple devices by way of unsecured public networks.
This background information is provided to reveal information believed by the applicant to be of possible relevance to the present invention. No admission is necessarily intended, nor should be construed, that any of the preceding information constitutes prior art against the present invention.